Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by harrisreynolds 1777 days ago
I hate to complain but visiting this site made me feel completely trapped. I literally could not do anything and could not escape to even close the browser (mouse is 100% hijacked). I had to CMD-Q the whole browser just to get out of the site.

Surely there is some UX technique you guys can come up with to free the mouse and improve this.

Question for you... what is the best 3D website on the Internet? How do they solve this?

All the best to you guys!

6 comments

Thanks for the tip, we know we need to optimize for accessibility first. We have spent a lot of time optimizing our renderer for speed. To be honest, this is the first I am hearing about this bug so I would like to be able to learn more about your set up offline perhaps in an email. If you could email info@muse.place with your computer and browser setup that would be very helpful.

Also, one of our favorite websites have been https://nurtu.re/

It is built by Active Theory for Porter Robinson. I believe this could be the future. I guess they get away with it because they are in third person.

A tip for the Muse team: based on my experience with first-person 3D, a substantial portion of users don't understand pointerlock, and the built-in notification that browsers give usually are insufficient. It might be a good idea to put a persistent indicator that ESC can be used to get out of pointerlock.
yeah this isn't a bad idea. or maybe forcing the user to do the onboarding first?
I like to think we're one of the better ones https://ayvri.com

This is mostly just a side project now, after 6 years of work. We have our own 3D renderer, but are using our custom Cesium here.

Which browser do you use? Most seem to support pressing Esc to exit from this site, videos etc. I feel like that's more of a browser issue.
Gotta be honest here, we only really build for Chrome right now on the laptop/desktop. Safari is pretty buggy on desktop but what's pretty funny is that we optimized for Safari for mobile devices.
Firefox at least tells you to use ESC to get the pointer back.
> I literally could not do anything and could not escape to even close the browser (mouse is 100% hijacked). I had to CMD-Q the whole browser just to get out of the site.

To be scrupulously fair, the fact that a site can do this, even on purpose, is both a browser bug and a operating system bug (denial-of-service security vulnerability in both).

browsers are pretty limiting on this functionality as is - pretty long timeouts, and firefox/safari have very big indicators explaining how to disable it